Expectations from Final Fantasy 16 are monumentally high, not just because it’s a new Final Fantasy game, but also because the last time we got a new mainline game in the beloved series, things didn’t exactly go to plan. Though there’s plenty to love and enjoy in Final Fantasy 15, the game has its fair share of significant issues, likes its broken mess of a story which leaves of crucial plot points and narrative threads, relegating them to cross-media projects.
That, however, will not be the case with Final Fantasy 16. Speaking in a recent interview with Easy Allies, Final Fantasy 16 producer Naoki Yoshida said that the upcoming action RPG’s development team took special care to look back at Final Fantasy 15 and take steps to ensure that it avoids making the same mistakes as its predecessor. According to Yoshida, Final Fantasy 16 is going to tell “a complete story.”
“Not just for Final Fantasy 16, but for Creative Business Unit III as a whole, our kind of motto is to create a game that we as developers would enjoy playing while keeping the project in the black,” Yoshida said. “And because Final Fantasy 16 is not just a solo project, it comes in a series where you have 1 to 15, you kind of have to look back on what came before when approaching development, and looking back at the most recent, Final Fantasy 15, to see what they did right and what they did wrong.
“While there’s a lot of things that people enjoyed about Final Fantasy 15 there’s also people that were upset that it wasn’t a complete story or that they were promised certain things that ended up being canceled, and we wanted to make sure that we cover those in Final Fantasy 16 – as in we were going to focus on telling a complete story from beginning to end and not make those same mistakes as 15 did. And not just having a story that’s from beginning to end, but also a story that’s going to resonate with all types of players – the older players like me but also younger players – to have something that players are going to be able to understand and have fun.”
Plenty of new gameplay footage and story and gameplay details for Final Fantasy 16 have also recently emerged, courtesy of a fresh round of hands-on impressions- you can check all of that out through here.
Final Fantasy 16 is set to launch exclusively for the PS5 on June 22. It will also receive demo a couple of weeks before launch, which will allow players to carry over their progress into the full game.